Redstate

By robboyce Posted in War — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

The New Republic has at least one writer who they allow to sowrite under a pseudonym. They think this person is a US soldier, they have allowed him anonymity because he says he would be disciplined if his true identity were known.

The magazine granted anonymity to the writer to keep him from being punished by his military superiors and to allow him to write candidly, [New Republic's editor] Foer said. He said that he had met the writer and that he knows with “near certainty” that he is, in fact, a soldier.

So he (we can assume he, because the NR editor claims to have met "him" face to face) is someone claiming to be a soldier. He also claims to need to shield his ID because he fears military discipline. He claims that he has witnessed all sorts of less than savory things happening in his "unit".

What we know for certain then is that someone who is writing things that cannot be verified independently is claiming to be someone but that claim cannot be verified independently, under a name that is known to be phony.

What if this person was claiming anonymity not for his own protection from discipline but because he is not really a soldier. And what if his real motivation is to help destroy the American people's respect for their soldiers because he is actually an anti war zealot. And a further what if, his agenda coincided with the political bias of the people at the magazine in such a way that they did not wish to look too closely at his identity and motivations, that they only wished to print negative articles in order to influence the American people to push for an end to the Iraq war.

This second set of assumptions fits just as well as the first and there is really no one except the writer, the so called "Scott Thomas" who can definitively say which is true. In other words, these articles from Baghdad are worth almost as much as a the Iraqi sand our real soldiers shake out of their boots each night - not worth much at all.